paternalistic migration policies and the "global exile"

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DOI: 10.1177/0261018314526008 2014 34: 374 originally published online 1 April 2014Critical Social Policy

Amrita Pandemigration policies and the 'global exile'

'I prefer to go back the day before tomorrow, but I cannot': Paternalistic

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‘I prefer to go back the day before tomorrow, but I cannot’: Paternalistic migration policies and the ‘global exile’

A M R I T A P A N D EUniversity of Cape Town, South Africa

AbstractIn this paper I extend the literature on ‘illegal’ migrant workers by con-necting the macro-level discussion on policies to the lived experiences of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Lebanon. I analyse two seem-ingly contrasting categories of ‘illegal’ migrant workers. First, the MDWs working illegally and desperate to return home, who are unable to return because of the system of migration in Lebanon. Second, MDWs banned by their state from migrating to Lebanon but who choose devious ways to make the journey. I argue that despite their apparently disparate sub-ject positions, both sets of migrant workers are ‘illegal’ because of an underlying paternalism in the policies of nation-states towards MDWs – the gendered construction of MDWs as workers who need both protection and surveillance. This paternalism, in turn, produces a class of ‘global exiles’ who are working and living in prolonged separation from their home. They are abandoned by their home countries but trapped without any rights as either workers or citizens in the host country.

Key wordsillegal migration, Lebanon, migrant domestic workers, paternalistic policies

Corresponding author:Amrita Pande, Department of Sociology, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa. Email: [email protected]

526008CSP0010.1177/0261018314526008Critical Social PolicyPanderesearch-article2014

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P a n d e 375

Why would we want to stay here? If we are ever able to escape, we will never even look at Lebanon even in a map! Why would we want to live

here, yanih [I mean]? No saving. No nothing. I wish the police would catch us and send me home, bass [that’s it]. But I know them

[the police in Lebanon], even when they catch, they will be put me in jail only for a month and then they will release. Some of us have

actually gone to the police wanting to be arrested, just to be sent back home. But no, even there no escape. (excerpt from focus

group discussion with South Asian domestic workers living illegally in Lebanon, 2011)

Manila, Jan 28, 2011 – Six women were detained at Manila airport after being caught trying to sneak into Lebanon dressed as nuns

in a bid to get around a travel ban to the country. Their unusual dress and behaviour alerted officials. Under questioning they eventually admitted they were actually on their way to Lebanon to work as domestic helpers. The Philippines has banned people from going to Lebanon to work as helpers since 2007 due to the

security situation and inadequate legal protection for its labourers there. ‘Their appearance aroused our suspicion especially after

we noticed that one of them had red shoes, a colourful handbag and wore her nun’s costume improperly,’ an airport immigration

officer said in a statement. (excerpt from AFP news report, 2011)

The figure of an illegal or irregular migrant has been constructed as a major social problem in policy debates across the European Union and the United States, as well as in global and regional hubs in other parts of the world (De Genova, 2002; Portes, 1978; Sassen, 1999). It has generated a substan-tial scholarly literature from the perspectives of criminology, deviance, law, labour market and human rights. Three trends in this literature are worth emphasising. Much like Alejandro Portes’ observation over three decades ago, the predominant imperative of this literature remains ‘prescriptive’ in nature in that it ‘attempts to persuade readers to support one or another solution to the problem’ (1978: 469). Second, the image of the immigrant, especially the ‘illegal alien’, is often associated with that of a deviant immigrant residing in Europe or the United States. All the more curious since this image bears little relationship to the real distribution of global migration. Although the US has the largest absolute number of irregular immigrants, immigration and illegal immigration are not restricted to wealthier nations. There is ample evidence indicating that the number of people moving within the ‘global south’ or between the less developed nations is equally significant (Castles and Miller, 2009; Oishi, 2005). A noticeable third trend is the relative paucity of ethnographic or other qualitative research on the lived experiences of ‘illegal’ workers.



376 C r i t i c a l S o c i a l P o l i c y 34(3)

In this paper I extend the literature on ‘illegal’ migrant workers by con-necting the macro-level discussion on policies to the lived experiences of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) living and working ‘illegally’ in Leba-non. In order to capture the multiple gradations of non-citizenship and ‘ille-gality’, as well as the precarious nature of their work on an everyday basis, I use the term ‘precarious migrant workers’ to classify a whole range of respon-dents included in this study.1 For the purposes of this study, precarious migrant workers include those who have entered Lebanon through irregular means such as using falsified documents and those who have become illegal after escaping their original work contracts. As indicated by the excerpts at the beginning of the paper, I analyse two seemingly contrasting categories of precarious migrant workers. On the one hand are MDWs from differ-ent parts of Africa and Asia, working illegally in Lebanon and desperate to return home, but who are unable to return because of the system of migra-tion in Lebanon. On the other hand are Filipina MDWs who are banned by their state from migrating to Lebanon but who find creative ways to make the journey possible. I argue that despite their apparently disparate subject positions, both sets of migrant workers are precariously located because of an underlying paternalism in the policies of nation-states towards migrant domestic workers. This paternalism is evident in the gendered construction of a migrant domestic worker as someone who needs both protection and surveillance.2

This kind of paternalism in migration laws, in turn, produces a class of ‘global exiles’ who are working and living in prolonged separation from their home – abandoned by their home countries but trapped without any rights as either workers or citizens in the host country. Although the term ‘exile’ can be used for any individual prevented from going home or any stateless citizen, it is often set apart from other displaced citizens like the figure of the migrant or the refugee. While migrants and refugees are studied as mass phenomena, and their experiences essentialised as mass experiences, people in exile tend to be studied as individual figures (Mal-kki, 1995). There is much attention paid to the ‘exilic aesthetics’, with individual exilic figures being celebrated as rightful narrators of distance and loss (Malkki, 1995: 514; Said, 1984). My intention in labelling this class of migrant workers as ‘exiles’ is to bring attention to the narratives of individual migrants on everyday existence, distance and loss. I label them global exiles because their displacement and permanent statelessness affects and is affected by forces of globalisation and state responses to the increasing globalisation.

I demonstrate that the precarity of the class of global exiles is further accentuated by the state imperative (both the sending and the host nation-states) to maintain their temporality. But a regulatory framework that focuses on the temporary status of migrant workers has paradoxical impli-



P a n d e 377

cations for the worker, the state and the labour market. At one level, the lived experiences of this class of ‘global exiles’ disrupt the states’ attempt to surveil and discipline the movement of migrant domestic workers and maintain their temporality as contract workers. Their migrant status, in essence, becomes permanent because of the policies of the two nation-states. At another level, their existence eventually works to the benefit of both the nation-states. They provide a pool of disposable and cheap labour for undesirable jobs in the host nation and continue to send remittances back home without making any concomitant obligations on the sending nation-state.

The paper is organised as follows: the first section analyses the existing literature on the inherent paternalism in state policies in labour-exporting countries like the Philippines and Nepal, especially the strategic use of the language of citizenship, rights and obligations of female contract workers. A similar analysis of state policies towards migrant workers, especially migrant domestic workers, is provided for the host country – Lebanon. Next the research methodology is presented. The analysis section is divided into two subsections – the first analyses the illegal population ‘trapped’ in Lebanon and the second the seemingly disparate group of MDWs who choose to migrate despite the ban imposed by their nation-states. The underlying similarity in the precarity of the two sets of illegal migrant workers is the focus of the final section of the paper.

Temporality, gender and citizenship

With globalisation and increased migration, it has become more difficult to define the term ‘citizenship’. The figure of the migrant has unsettled the traditional notion of citizenship as a status acquired by either birth or naturalisation that fixes an individual’s relationship to a given nation-state as well as prescribes related rights and duties (Chimienti and Sol-omos, 2011). These are times of ‘citizenship in flux’ and a new, more complex ‘vocabulary’ of citizenship, rights and obligations is required – often one with ‘seemingly contrasting characteristics’ (Isin, 2009: 368). The relative temporality of migrants is a critical factor in determining the nature of rights and obligations, and hence selectively appropriated by nation-states, at both ends of the migratory conduit, to expand or restrict the definition of citizenship.

Labour-exporting nations, which critically depend on remittances sent by their migrant workers, have used different discourses of citizenship, rights and obligation for temporary as opposed to permanent out-migrants. The Philippines is currently among the world’s largest exporters of temporary contract labour, with its nationals spread across 200 countries across the




globe (Guevarra, 2006; Liebelt, 2008). In the 1970s, when out-migration was seen merely as a short-term solution to economic and political crises, the Philippine state used the Balikbayan (nation returnee) programme to attract all emigrants back as ‘glorified tourists’ in the hope that the presence of the returning migrants would inject new money into the economy (Rodriguez, 2002). Over time, as overseas employment was recognised as a more long-term reality, the attempts to attract emigrants back into the nation were replaced by specific state strategies targeting the growing pool of flexible and ‘temporary’ migrants – overseas contract workers (OCWs). Overseas contract workers (and not emigrants) were celebrated as the new national heroes or heroines. The state project extended some economic and social rights to the OCWs but also defined a Filipino OCW’s obligations and duties towards the employer, the host nation as well as the home nation. OCWs, as temporary migrants, were deemed to be citizens with tax-paying obligations as well as the obligation to send remittances back home.

The Filipino state’s strategic inclusion of OCWs as ‘convenient citizens’, who send back remittances and yet make few claims on the state, has a critical gendered dimension. This is evident not just in the demography of temporary migrants – over 70% of the annual outflow of temporary migrants are women (Oishi, 2005: 5) – but also in the state’s response to female OCWs, especially women migrating to work as domestic workers. Scholars have previously ana-lysed the role of the state as a ‘labour broker’ in ‘producing, distributing, and regulating Filipinas as care workers across the globe’ (Rodriguez, 2008: 794). The state’s role as a broker and promoter of female labour has been exception-ally complicated. Increasing public unrest, and the recent media focus on the high rate of abuse of its female nationals have posed challenges to the state’s labour brokering priorities. The state has responded in several ways: imposing a minimum age requirement on female migrants, basic language and house-work training and by proclaiming domestic work as a ‘vulnerable occupation’.

In an astute analysis of the Philippine state’s classification of domestic work as a ‘vulnerable occupation’ and its incorporation of a ‘gender sen-sitivity’ criterion in the Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act of 1995, Anna Romina Guevarra (2006) demonstrates that the state’s strategy is misplaced and counterproductive. Essentially the state classified domes-tic workers as more vulnerable than skilled professionals who ‘know their worth’ because domestic work is assumed to not require the ‘same level of academic and skill training or the requisite class status’ (Guevarra, 2006: 530). These assumptions, in turn, determined the actual policy outcomes. For instance, the state’s strategy of providing training for domestic work was based on the notion that much of the abuse faced by domestic workers is caused by strained relations between domestic workers and employers, which in turn was assumed to be the result of unskilled use of appliances by untrained domestic workers (Guevarra, 2006). Another state strategy



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to manage the so-called ‘social costs of migration’ on their families was to ‘train’ migrant women to become loving (long-distance) mothers and loyal wives. Instead of addressing the structural factors that accentuate the vulner-ability of MDWs as well as their families left behind, the strategy of worker ‘training’ merely deepens the ‘disciplinary gaze’ on women migrant workers and ‘designates Filipina migrants, not the state or the foreign employers, socially responsible for the creation, elimination, or prevention of particular social problems’ (Guevarra, 2006: 534). In addition, by training workers to modify their own behaviours so as to better manage their sexual and gender relations, the state inevitably reproduces normative gender roles.3 The lat-est addition to these gendered responses of the state to its female citizens working overseas, is a law banning Filipina women from travelling for work in ‘vulnerable occupations’ in 41 countries including Afghanistan, Libya, Sudan, Iraq, Lebanon, and Pakistan (Ruiz, 2011).

But the Philippines is not the only country with gendered responses to its migrating population. As sociologist Nana Oishi (2005: 12) noted in her study of migration policies in Asia, ‘value laden policies’ regulate the mobil-ity of women in many sending countries across Asia. Emigration policies of countries impose various restrictions (age, choice of occupation), or even pro-hibit women from emigrating altogether.4 In contrast, these sending coun-tries seldom impose similar regulations with regard to the emigration of men. Although the Philippines’ emigration policies are the focus of most studies, other labour-exporting countries, like Nepal, Madagascar, and Ethiopia have emulated similar approaches, including a total deployment ban, to ‘protect’ its female out-migrants. At one level, the imposition of a blanket ban on the travel and work of women can be read as a pioneering attempt by a sending nation to protect its nationals. But at another level, the ban is just another indicator of the sending state’s gendered classification of domestic work as ‘unskilled’ and the workers as unknowing victims who can be easily duped and hence need both surveillance and protection. The logic of the ban reso-nates with and reifies similar gendered tropes. For instance Nepal, which bans women under the age of 30 from travelling for work to Lebanon, explains the logic of the age barrier as ‘Women who crossed 30 years of age … would have good tolerance towards kids’ (Ahmed, 2012). The underlying reasoning is the same as the one behind ‘training’ Filipina women – mature domestic workers are less likely to anger their employers by their child care ‘inexperience’, and hence will be subject to less abuse. In essence, such state discourses implicitly hold migrant women responsible for their own exploitation, and absolve the state and other actors from any responsibility. I connect the state’s paternalis-tic policy of a protectionist ban with the lived experiences of precarious work-ers in the analysis section. I argue that this extension of citizenship becomes ‘a means by which the state disciplines migrants as cheap, flexible labour for the global economy’ (Rodriguez, 2002: 348).




State policies that are premised on gendered assumptions about migrant domestic workers are not restricted to the sending countries. On the other end of the migratory conduit is the host state – Lebanon. I turn now to an analysis of the inherent paternalism in the current system of migration in Lebanon – the kafala or sponsorship system.

Sponsoring migrant domestic work in Lebanon

To enter Lebanon for work, a MDW has to be officially sponsored by a spon-sor or kafil. Historically, the term kafala has been used to describe a mech-anism for hosting foreigners in several countries in the Arabian Peninsula (Longva, 1999). Through the kafala, citizens would vouch for a foreign visi-tor, and assume responsibility for his/her behaviour and safety. It was also a way of (temporarily) incorporating foreigners into local social networks. But as migration to the region increased this traditional mechanism became a ‘legal and state-based system for governing foreign labour’ (Gardner, 2011: 8). In its contemporary form, the sponsorship system clearly reflects the host nation’s paternalistic assumption that female migrant workers need constant surveillance and protection. By making the sponsor legally responsible for the migrant, the state’s responsibility for ‘alien surveillance’ is passed on to the (often female) employer (Lee, 2009; Pande, 2012, 2013). This absolves the host government from providing the worker with any kind of labour protec-tion (Longva, 1999). In effect, the kafala system ensures that the legitimacy of a MDW as a citizen is inextricably connected to her sponsor. The sys-tem ensures that the worker becomes legally and economically dependent on her sponsor not just for recruitment but for daily sustenance and for stay-ing legal (Pande, 2013). The MDW depends on the employer for a valid work permit which requires annual renewals (Human Rights Watch Report, 2010). Employers often use their ‘protector’ role to legitimise confiscating the MDW’s passport, surveilling the worker’s every activity and severely restricting her freedom of movement.5 A MDW cannot change her employer or break a contract unless the employer agrees to sign a release waiver before a notary public, and until Lebanese authorities allow the ‘release’ to take place. The worker needs the permission of the original sponsor to leave Lebanon and return to her home country and she becomes illegal if she leaves her sponsor without his/her consent and official release.

Although some features of the kafala system are specific to Lebanon, par-allels can be found not only in sponsorship systems in many other Gulf states but also in ‘temporary’, ‘contract-based’ and ‘guest worker’ programmes across the world (Baldwin-Edwards, 2005; Gardner, 2011; Lan, 2007; Mahdavi and Sergeant, 2011; Pande, 2013). The guest worker migration programme is prevalent in many parts of Europe as well, albeit with national variations. The



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guest worker migration programme permits migrants in ‘unskilled jobs’, or, what are aptly termed the ‘three D’ jobs (dirty, dangerous and difficult), to come into the country but only as temporary workers. Essentially, by allow-ing only temporary contracts, preventing migrant workers from naturalisa-tion and discouraging family reunification, the ‘host state externalizes the cost of renewing labor to the economies and states of origin’ (Lan, 2007: 256). In the analysis section of this paper, I use the lived experiences of precarious migrant workers in Lebanon to argue that a regulatory framework that focuses on paternalistic construction of female migrants and their temporary status has paradoxical implications for the worker, the state and the labour market.

Researching migrant domestic work

This paper is based on a broader project for which fieldwork was conducted between 2009 and 2011 in Lebanon’s two biggest cities – Beirut and Trip-oli.6 Over the two years, oral histories were collected from 68 MDWs. The respondents included women working under various configurations of precar-ity: women currently working as live-ins who came in with false papers or passports in order to escape their country’s ban but who were subsequently legalised by their sponsors, women who escaped their initial contracts to work as ‘freelancers’, and women with ‘nominal sponsors’. Apart from the first category of workers who work in the houses of their legal sponsors, all other categories are considered illegal by Lebanese authorities. A freelancer, for instance, is a worker who works for several employers and lives indepen-dently. In most cases freelance workers are women who no longer work for their original sponsors and whose sponsors have not legally released them. A nominal sponsor is usually a Lebanese individual who (in return for a fee paid by the worker) acts as a sponsor. A nominal sponsor does not expect the worker to live or work the majority of the working day within his/her house. Although paying for nominal sponsors is a popular strategy employed by MDWs attempting to gain some degree of legality, it is, in fact, an illegal practice and can be penalised under the present system. Twenty-two of the 68 respondents in this study can be classified as precarious migrant workers. Fourteen reported being without any kind of legal paper that allows them to work in Lebanon or with nominal sponsors while eight had paid nominal sponsors to arrange for some kind of a legal paper.

Individual interactions were complemented by a series of five structured focus group discussions. The first focus group comprised 17 migrant workers (15 women and two men) who were identified as leaders by their community – the leaders often provided assistance to migrant workers in times of need, especially precarious workers searching for refuge or employment. The sec-ond focus group was with 21 oral history participants from 10 nationalities




working as either live-ins or illegal/precarious workers in different parts of Lebanon. The final three focus groups were held with communities of pre-carious migrant workers: runaway women workers from South Asia working for a cleaning company, women seeking shelter at the Philippines embassy in Beirut and a group of freelancers from different countries in Africa. These community meetings allowed the researcher to focus on specific challenges faced by precarious workers from different communities.

Finally, participant-observation for over six months was conducted in the spaces where MDWs gather to spend their day off, such as churches, ethnic stores and restaurants, cybercafés, and rental apartments inhabited by free-lancers and runaways. Given the contentious legal status of some of the partic-ipants in this study, consent was taken from all respondents and pseudonyms have been used throughout the paper.

‘I prefer to go back the day before tomorrow, but I cannot’: Outlawing the right to return

In Lebanon, the status of migrant domestic workers is often reported as the ‘horrific abuse of migrant maids’ (Human Rights Watch, 2008; Jureidini, 2010, 2011). In much of this debate, the issue is framed in the context of individually abusive employer–worker relationships. A closer analysis, how-ever, reveals that much of the abuse is, in fact, structural and can be traced to the kafala system of migration with its inherent tendency to tie a worker with her sponsor. I have argued elsewhere that the kafala system not only creates conditions for many of the ‘abuses’, it is responsible for creating a new popula-tion of readily exploitable workers – the category of ‘illegal workers’ without any legal papers (Pande, 2013). The kafala system makes a worker illegal as soon as she breaks the original contract, even if she is terminating an abu-sive contract. But the same system makes it impossible for the now ‘illegal’ migrant to return to her home country, and, in essence, traps her in Lebanon. To either become legal or to return home, illegal MDWs have to pay a fine of $375 for each year that they worked and lived illegally in Lebanon. Addi-tionally their sponsor may demand reimbursement of the money ‘invested’ by them. MDWs may even be required to serve time in prison for the years that they worked and lived illegally. The longer a MDW stays illegally in Leba-non, the less likely that she would be able to pay off the cumulative annual penalties to leave the country.

But these workers are ‘precarious’ in terms of not only citizenship but also work. In essence, such legal systems intersect with employer strategies of exploitation by creating a pool of flexible and cheap labour (Goldring and Landolt, 2009; Sharma, 2006). Most of the legally precarious women sustain themselves by working as freelance domestic workers or in related employ-



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ment in offices, cleaning companies, restaurants and salons or as tailors, nurses and waitresses. These workers often compare their present lives with their lives as (legal) live-ins. While freelance work gave them more flexibility in choosing employers, more privacy, mobility and the ability to stay with their family, these benefits were constantly undermined by the increased uncer-tainty of income, the fear of incarceration and deportation. The narratives of these women demonstrate that their precarious legal status led to precarity at work and in their everyday existence in the immigrant neighbourhood.

Dora, near Beirut, is the biggest of such immigrant neighbourhoods, with a substantial proportion of migrants working and living without legal docu-ments. Workers rent apartments in Dora and one apartment is often shared by up to 20 women. Most buildings in Dora have bullet-ridden exteriors, remnants of the last war in the region, the electricity supply is uncertain and the area is plunged into total darkness every day from 6:00pm to midnight. I visit the top floor of one such building, which is occupied by 12 South Asian women working in a cleaning company. This is the venue for our first focus group discussion. The women have been living at the apartment for varying lengths of time. While two escaped their sponsors and arrived at the apart-ment just a week before the focus group is conducted, others have been living in that apartment for years, one for over eight years. Sandhya, who has resided in the apartment the longest, highlights the intersections between precarious legal status and precarity at work.

See we are totally illegal, yanih, with no paper at all. It is not easy for us to find jobs on our own, we cannot go like that and ask ‘Do you need a worker?’, because we can get caught by police or general security. Better we go to these cleaning companies and ask them jobs. Lebanese people do not believe [trust] migrant women. If something wrong who they call? If there is damage they want to hold someone responsible if the woman worker causes some damage. They get ready to hire me if I go through a company.

The precarity of workers, however, works to the advantage of local employers and businesses and the workers are aware of this reality. Deeksha, hired by the same cleaning company, has been living in that apartment and working illegally as a cleaner in a bank.

Usually they don’t ask. This kind of cleaning company, they don’t ask for papers. There are many girls and many boys they are working without paper. They want this kind of girls, so that not to pay government tax. You know government tax is expensive. If they hire one girl legally, they have to pay 1,000, 2,000 dollar as tax. Also to make girl sleep in the bank every day [for night duties] they will also have to pay lodging and food. But if they find such a girl like me [without papers], it is better for them to save money, you know?




The women recognise that their illegal status makes them more vulner-able to exploitation at work. The meagre monthly salaries and the uncertainty of income mean that most freelancers are unable to save anything. The women reveal that they have no definite plans for the future and all echo the feeling of being ‘trapped’ in Lebanon. Seema, who has been working illegally for three years, challenges the notion of freelancers being better off than live-in con-tract workers and reiterates their inability to escape the situation.

You call us freelancers. Why? We are not free! I cannot even think of getting my legal papers fixed, I know I will never save money to pay all the fine. Most of us here do not even have information on how much is the fine, what are the chances of deportation. But one thing is for sure: if possible I want to be deported. Inshallah [God willing]. If I am ever able to escape this country, I will not come back.

Seema is not the only one to challenge the notion that freelancers are ‘free’ to move around. Most others in the group share her sense of hopelessness. The women accept that they have no financial incentive to be in Lebanon, but they cannot return to their home country. The only way for them to leave the country is to pay the sponsor, the cumulative fines as well as for their flight back home. The women emphasise that they are both unwilling and unable to make these payments. Most women have no strategies for becoming legal and absolutely no plans for the future.

The overarching sense of being trapped in the host country is not limited to this community. I meet Becky in another apartment in the same build-ing. Becky, a 53-year-old migrant from the Seychelles has spent 17 years as a freelance worker without legal documents in Lebanon. The life stories of Becky and her family revolve around coming in and out of prison and their struggle to become legal. Her nephew has been to prison three times in the last five years because he does not possess any legal work visa and her son has been recently deported to the Seychelles. Becky describes her life in Lebanon like that of a ‘prisoner’:

I cannot go around, I am like a prisoner, even if I stay 100 years here I am like a prisoner, even if I get a sponsor [a nominal sponsor], still every year I have to go and pay for him. I’m still a foreigner, yanih [that is], I spent 17 years here, if I was in Europe, 17 years I would be something, something [a citizen]. I would be somebody today, you understand, out here but I remain a prisoner.

In a group discussion with a mixed group of African, Sri Lankan and Nepalese nationals working as freelancers in Beirut, other participants echo Becky’s narrative. All the workers in this group accept that the annual fines that they have accumulated over their years of illegal work essentially trap



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them in Lebanon. Dilipa from Sri Lanka has been working as an illegal free-lancer for nine years; she is married to a Sudanese refugee who also works as a cleaner but is legal. Dilipa recounts the path to her illegality,

I never had any papers, ever. My employers never paid for the papers that need to be renewed every year. Instead they cut my monthly salary and wanted me to pay for it myself. I did for two years, then I ran away without my papers or passport … I have been like this [illegal] for nine years. Now I have no chances of getting papers or of leaving Lebanon. I do not know how much money I need to have papers cleared or to give to the Madam in order to get her passport back. But whatever it is, I know I don’t have.

As well as the accumulated fines, another factor that literally traps the migrant in Lebanon is non-possession of a passport. Most sponsors do not allow the MDW to access her passport throughout the length of her stay. This withholding of a passport can be seen as a form of ‘insurance policy’ against the MDW running away, since employers/sponsors typically make an up-front payment for the MDW recruited (Jureidini, 2003: 8). In this study, for instance, only one of the MDWs living with her sponsor was allowed access to her passport. Many workers who want to terminate their contract are forced to escape their sponsor’s house without taking their passports.

Tania from Benin has been in Lebanon for 35 years, more than half of which she has spent being an illegal freelance domestic worker. Her dream is to return to Africa with her adult son. But she knows that she cannot leave Lebanon without going through years of detention. Her passport is still with her first sponsor whose house she escaped over 23 years ago. She does not have enough savings to pay her sponsor to return her passport. Tania describes the legal system in Lebanon as one ‘where people with money can buy laws’, while people like her remain like a ‘mouse trapped’.

Here, yanih, law is also wrong. If I have money I can buy law, but only if you have money. Look, I work so many years for my sponsor. I work really like a donkey, one year, where my money? They cut it all for my papers. When I say I want to leave, she say she wants my money. My madam wants 1700 dollars for giving back my passport. Is this not wrong? Who do I speak about this, nobody, even I go to lawyer, he need money from me … So here I am living, living like, like I say, a mouse trapped.

I ask Tania if she has heard of the taswiah (amnesty) system where the government gives illegal workers the chance to fix their legal documents. She replies angrily,

Eh bas [enough], I know it come out once in a year, taswiah. Everybody outside and inside prisons, who doesn’t have document allowed to fix his documents.




Yanih, but I have spent 23 years in Lebanon without documents, without papers. Tell me, how I pay for that one, everything is khallas [finished], it’s gone. If I go for taswiah, I will have to pay 5 million Lira or something. Where I get that from? I want to go back to Africa with my family, but I can never, I know.

While almost all the precarious migrants stated that they felt physi-cally ‘trapped’ by the system, there were others who were reluctant to return because of the ‘shame’ of returning (after so long and after so much suffer-ing) without anything to show for it. Angelique is 19 years old and one of the youngest respondents in this study. She moved to Lebanon to be with her mother, a freelancer who pays a Lebanese family to be her nominal spon-sors. When I met Angelique she was waiting to get her papers renewed. She empathises with her mother’s dream of returning to Africa but is convinced that the dream is unrealistic.

Going to Africa is something nice okay, but how do you go to Africa? You go, you don’t have money to buy a house, you don’t have money to live, masalan [for instance]. Bas imagine, you go to Africa and rent a place, 26 years you [her mother] has been in Lebanon and you cannot rent a place in your country, it’s a shame, it’s a big shame. I prefer to go to Africa the day before tomorrow but with empty pocket, with nothing, it’s a shame, very big shame, terrible one. We will just survive here, in Lebanon, no other way but to go like this …

Unlike the stereotypical image of an ‘illegal alien’ as one who is desperate to escape the law and remain in the host country indefinitely, most precari-ous workers in this study reiterated their desperate longing to return home. Bella from Togo concludes the discussion with a message for the government of Lebanon:

I want to tell the government, you don’t need to pay for me salary nothing, nothing at all. Just give me the visa so that I can stay without sponsor. So I’ll have the freedom in Lebanon. If you cannot do that, let me go home. Let me be free from this. Because the only way to live in a better way? To live in a better way, is to leave the country, bas [that’s it].

The narratives of loss, desperation and longing for home analysed in this section underscore the paradoxical impact of regulatory systems like the kafala system of migration. Contract-based systems of migration and employment are based on the twin imperatives of ensuring that migration is temporary, and that migrant workers’ presence in the host country can be effectively surveilled, by either the state or employers. Despite the state imperative of maintaining the temporality of the migrants, the sponsorship system itself creates a class of precarious migrant workers in Lebanon and inadvertently



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ensures that these workers remain permanently in Lebanon and are unable to return. In effect, these women workers become part of a growing population of ‘global exiles’ who are neither protected by their home countries nor recog-nised as citizens of the receiving nation-state.

‘Any way to leave home’: Outlawing the right to depart

Most of the major sending countries like the Philippines, Ethiopia, Nepal and Madagascar have banned their female nationals from travelling to Lebanon as domestic workers because of concerns over their lack of legal protection (Menchik et al., 2013). But migrant women from these same nations con-tinue to find ways to circumvent these bans and travel to Lebanon every year. The narratives and life stories of women in this study indicate that bans are not just ineffective but also counterproductive. In the short term, travel and work deployment bans have no impact on the working and living conditions of workers already working under contract. The conditions often worsen for new migrants. New migrants regularly circumvent these bans and, in effect, the only consequence is to further complicate the migratory paths and experiences of the women workers. New migrants bypass the ban by entering Lebanon ille-gally through other countries or through traffickers. Sixteen of the 18 partici-pants who migrated from countries that have deployment bans, revealed that to circumvent the ban they had to travel to Lebanon via multiple countries.

Much like the sponsorship system of immigration, protectionist emigra-tion policies like bans merely increase women’s dependence on middle people and brokers as well as their vulnerability as undocumented workers. Recruit-ment agencies with ties to agencies in Lebanon devise various ways of smug-gling women from the Philippines to Lebanon via other routes – in effect, the ban increases the power of agencies and brokers. Other migrants indicate that the ban facilitates new forms of exploitation and deception of women work-ers by recruitment agents. Angel from the Philippines reveals that she never intended to migrate to Lebanon:

But I never wanted to come to Lebanon. As a matter of fact, till the end I didn’t know that I am coming here – I thought I was going to Dubai. In the Philippines the only thing we know of Lebanon is that it is a country of lots of fighting and war. So I didn’t want to come here at all. My agent, who did my papers told me that I was going to Dubai. That is also what my papers show – tourist visa to UAE! Only on the day I was in the airport did she [the agent] tell me that because of the ban, I was to first just go to Dubai and then come to Lebanon.But along with these stories of deception, are narratives of women choos-

ing Lebanon in spite of the ban and strategising ways to bypass the ban. Joan




is a recent migrant from the Philippines and had entered the country clandes-tinely, or in her words ‘funnily’.

Yahih [that is], I knew they [the immigration officers at Philippines] did not want me to go. But I wanted to go, you see, so here I am! You know what I did to come here? I came here, umm, funnily. I did not want them to find the papers the agency had given me. So what I did? I stuff it in my bra [she laughs out loud]. Who would think I want to leave so much? But I did.

Although Joan recalls her experiences with humour, her journey was far from painless. It involved 80 hours of travel on boat, bus and airplanes – via Bang-kok and Bahrain. Each stopover required another layer of subterfuge since the ban meant that she did not have a legal work visa.

I stayed 18 hours in Bahrain … no money to buy nothing. Whenever I saw an airport man, I would hide in the bathroom. There an Indonesian cleaner lady saw me crying and shared some of her food. I was without food otherwise, all the journey, with no place to even sleep or rest.

In essence the state’s attempt to play a protectionist role further increases the vulnerability of women workers. It has two concomitant effects – it undermines their rights as citizens to make demands on the home nation, and it impedes their right to return home. In the words of a Filipina community leader Nina, now women migrants have an ‘extra burden of explaining their choices’,

Now, new women [migrants] have to deal with extra burden – of explaining their choice to be illegal … If they are in problem, what will they say to the embassy? They chose to come illegally, so it’s their business not the government’s. And when it is time to leave, the ones who arrive legally get first right to return. (emphasis added)

Nina highlights two critical outcomes of the ban – women who migrate against state instructions not only bear the additional burden of migrating without legal papers but are also held accountable for their own decisions. As women who ‘choose’ to migrate despite state instructions to the contrary, they are deemed to be less entitled to protection by their consulates and embassies in host nations. Their right as citizens to make demands on their nation-states gets restricted because of their decision to migrate. In addition, their right to return home gets severely constrained. Several of the respondents who had migrated despite a ban – even migrants who had subsequently obtained legal work visas – confessed that they were reluctant to even visit home, since returning to Lebanon required another cycle of subterfuge.



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Although in some sense they are more mobile than the ‘trapped’ women discussed in the previous section, they too are reduced to a class of global exile by a state policy that fails to recognise their mobility as a rational decision and their identities as workers.

Discussion

In this paper I extended the literature on ‘illegal’ migrant workers by focusing on the lived experiences of migrant domestic workers living and working in various levels of precarity in Lebanon. Contrary to the Black Atlantic slavery narratives of forced migrations, which find much resonance in contemporary writings on ‘trafficking’ of female migrants, much of the lived experiences of migrants in this study contradict assumptions about the forced nature of their initial movement. While the ‘voluntary’ nature of their out-migration sets the women in this study apart from refugees and those in exile, what brings in the forced nature is ironically their inability to leave their migrant status and return home. Unlike the stereotypical image of an ‘illegal alien’ as someone who finds devious means to remain in the host country indefinitely, most respondents in this study reiterated their desperate longing to return home. I argued that this inability to return is primarily due to state policies of migration that are often gendered and ‘conveniently’ paternalistic (paternal-ism without accepting responsibilities) in nature.

It is not really surprising that state policies are gendered in nature. Women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of their nation and consequently the symbolic property of their nation, an embodiment of national pride that needs to be protected (McClintock et al., 1997; Oishi, 2005). Emigration policies then become a state project not just to solidify the state’s identity as ‘protector’ of its women, but also as a way to transmit dis-ciplinary values to its citizens. This is evident, for instance, in the contradic-tory celebration of female migrants as ‘national heroines’ as well as the prime culprits in the abandonment of their children and subsequent moral decay of the future generation. The paternalism is stark in the deployment bans imposed by sending nations on female nationals choosing to emigrate. By imposing a ban, sending nations can absolve themselves from responsibilities, deflect the need for state-level and structural changes in labour conditions of migrants, and diminish migrants’ control over their mobility and labour (Parreñas, 2010). Such outright prohibitionist policies reflect the gendered assumptions shared by many nations that it is impossible to protect the labour rights of domestic workers and the only solution is for the state to restrict the right to mobility of female citizens.

Much like states’ responses to female citizens who emigrate for work, immigration policies of host nations reflect gendered assumptions about




female migrant workers. The sponsorship system in host nations like Leba-non does not recognise the worker status of female immigrants and instead emphasises their vulnerability to easy moral corruptibility and hence need for surveillance. It intimately ties the citizenship of a female migrant worker to her sponsor-employer, and legitimises employer-based surveillance and disci-pline of migrant domestic workers. The system labels a worker as ‘illegal’ as soon as she breaks the original contract, even if she is terminating an abusive contract. The same system makes it impossible for the now ‘illegal’ migrant to return to her home country and instead creates a class of global exile with-out any legal papers and without any rights over either nation-state. But this class of migrant is precarious in terms of not only citizenship but also work. In essence, such migration systems intersect with employer strategies of exploi-tation by creating a convenient pool of desperate and cheap labour.

Although these two sets of policies involve different nation-states and affect two seemingly disparate categories of migrants, there are some underlying par-allels in their impact on the lived experiences of migrant domestic workers. Both make the female migrant workers more vulnerable, increase their depen-dency on middle people and brokers and create a class of easily exploitable pre-carious workers with few rights as citizens in either sending or host nations. In effect, these paternalistic policies – whether by the sending or host nations – keep ‘temporary’ migrants in permanent exile, by adding layers of precarity in their citizenship and work status and by disallowing their right to return.

AcknowledgementsI am grateful to Voices International and the Carnegie Research development grant given by the University of Cape Town for making the second stage of this project possible. A special thank you to Ruth Bonazza and Joana Hauff for their more than able assistance.

FundingFunding was provided by the University of Cape Town, South Africa and Voices International, a non-profit development NGO that works directly with vulnerable groups.

Notes1. I borrow the concept of a ‘precarious status’ from Luin Goldring and Patricia

Landolt (2011) who provide an insightful study of the intersection of precari-ous employment with precarious legal status in the everyday lives of immigrant workers in Toronto. According to Goldring and Landolt, a precarious status is marked by any of the following: ‘the absence of permanent residence authori-zation; lack of permanent work authorization; depending on a third party for residence or employment rights; restricted or no access to public services and



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protections available to permanent residents (e.g. healthcare, education, union-ization, workplace rights); and deportability’ (2011: 328).

2. Paternalism refers to governance as if by a benevolent parent (Blackburn, 2008). Paternalistic state policies involve interference in a person’s choice often with the objective of furthering the person’s perceived welfare. In this case, however, neither the sending nor the receiving state wants to take responsibility for these workers and become the ‘benevolent’ paternal state.

3. See Guevarra (2006) for a detailed analysis of the gendered nature of the state’s strategy of ‘empowering’ women workers by holding them responsible for main-taining traditional roles of a ‘good wife and good mother’ and for managing their family and sexual lives.

4. See Oishi (2005: 60) for a systematic tabular comparison of different states’ paternalistic responses to female migration in Asia.

5. I have previously discussed the effect of such surveillance on the lived experi-ences of live-in MDWs (Pande, 2012). In this article my focus is on another category of workers – women living illegally after escaping their initial con-tracts and home of their sponsors and/or women who are working illegally as freelancers.

6. I started the first phase of the research project in 2008 as an independent researcher. Ruth Bonazza and Joana Hauff assisted the project in its second stage, as part of the research team for Voices International, a non-profit development NGO that works directly with vulnerable groups.

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Author biographyAmrita Pande teaches in the Sociology Department at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research primarily lies at the intersection of globalisation and reproductive labour. Her work has appeared in Signs, Gender and Society, International Migration Review, Qualitative Sociology, Feminist Studies, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Reproductive Bio Medicine and in several edited volumes. She is currently writing a monograph based on her multi-year ethnographic study of surrogacy clinics in India. She is also involved as a performer and educator in a theatre production, Notes from a Baby Farm (http://globalstories.net/productions/made-in-india/) based on her work on surrogacy. Her other ongoing projects include research and advocacy work on restrictive systems of migration and the effects on the lived experiences of migrant workers in Lebanon and South Africa.



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paternalistic migration policies and the "global exile"